Dr Richard Batista, from Ronkonkoma, New York, who is being divorced by
his wife Dawnell, has asked she include the kidney he donated to her
for transplant in the divorce settlement. Batista puts the value of the
organ at $1.5 million, a court in Mineola, New York, has heard. There
is little chance he will get his way. Asked how likely it would be for
the doctor to either get his kidney back or get money for it, Arthur
Caplan at the Centre for Bioethics, the University of Pennsylvania,
said it was "somewhere between impossible and completely impossible."
Robert Veatch, a medical ethicist at Georgetown University's Kennedy
Institute of Ethics, agrees. "It's illegal for an organ to be exchanged
for anything of value" because organs may not be bought or sold, he
said. And as the donation of an organ is considered a gift, legally
"when you give something, you can't get it back." "It's her kidney now
and ... taking the kidney out would mean she would have to go on
dialysis or it would kill her," Veatch said.